Rate My Professor Luis Cortest

Luis Cortest is Professor of Spanish and Section Head for Medieval Spanish Literature and Culture in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma, Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. He earned a Ph.D. in Medieval Hispanic literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, following studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Cortest chaired the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics from 1992 to 1999. His research specializes in Spanish religious writers of the sixteenth century, medieval Spanish literature, the history of Spanish scholasticism, and natural law theory. He is also faculty in the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and affiliated faculty in the Schusterman Center for Judaic and Israel Studies.

Cortest has produced several key scholarly works, including the critical edition of the Arte para servir a Dios by Fray Alonso de Madrid (1989), editor of a collection of studies on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1989), editor of a festschrift for José Durán (1994), The Disfigured Face: Traditional Natural Law and its Encounter with Modernity (2008) on the medieval and Early Modern natural law tradition, a modern edition of the sixteenth-century Regimiento de la vida by Moshe Almosnino (2011), and Philo's Heirs: Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas (2017), which examines Philo of Alexandria's philosophical method's influence on Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thinkers up to Baruch Spinoza. In 2025, he received a National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman’s Award (FEJ-310338-25, $30,000) for his biography project Juan de Mariana, the Last Great Spanish Thinker, detailing the life of the Spanish priest and historian (1534-1624), including his editorial work on the Antwerp Polyglot Bible and defense of tyrannicide, with submission planned by 2027.